A lot of the buzz generated from the Super Bowl centered on the Netflix premiere of The Cloverfield Paradox. It was anticipated by many fans of the Cloverfield movies since it promised that it would explain the first Cloverfield film. Well, the film left many people confused as to what it all meant. Sure, it was the weakest of the Cloverfield films, but it explained how the three films are connected, though it was done clumsily. Ahead of this will be major spoilers for all three Cloverfield films.

The Cloverfield saga started ten years ago with the release of the first film, which at the time before its release was kept in secrecy. A bunch of clues about the film’s content was teased and after the film came out, many obsessed over the origin of the giant Cloverfield monster that wrecked New York City. As time passed and no sequels appeared, interest died off until a couple of years ago when the film 10 Cloverfield Lane was suddenly released. Originally, the dark, atmospheric thriller did not have any connection to the first film until vague Easter eggs were added. But the sci-fi angle confused fans. The giant kaiju from the first film never appeared, instead the world was threatened by invading aliens.

The Cloverfield Paradox (originally called God Particle) offered an explanation as to what caused these events. As viewers know, The Cloverfield Paradox takes place in a space station that uses a Hadron Collider to solve the world’s energy problems in the near future. This transports the station  into an alternate reality where World War III breaks out on Earth and the crewmembers spend the film figuring this out and trying to find a way back to their own dimension. When the surviving crew returns to their own reality the big reveal at the end is that their world is under attack by a super giant Cloverfield monster.

Many viewers were perplexed. The film takes place in the near future, so how come no one remembered the first Cloverfield film or the alien invasion from the second film? The answer is simple, the experiment on the space station ripped open the barriers between dimensions that affected the past (Cloverfield in 2008), present (10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016 for our present, more or less) and future (The Cloverfield Paradox or the third film’s present). This was foreshadowed early in the film by a conspiracy writer that this event would occur and the world would be invaded by monsters, aliens and demons. Note that the fourth upcoming Cloverfield film, called for now Overlord, takes place in World War II and deals with Nazis and the supernatural, so that writer’s claims about demons and the past being affected could be applied there. Who knows, maybe we’re next?

The Cloverfield Paradox has many problems, not just that the Cloverfield connections were obviously inserted into the film. But at least there’s an explanation for the bizarre sci-fi events in the film anthology.

Waldermann Rivera